Saturday at 9:30 am, a group of Colorado women and family members will gather at Civic Center Park’s Greek Amphitheater for a rally to protect women’s access to health care, and for the right of each woman to make her own health care decisions.
CBS News aired undercover video Friday that captured Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner and other Tea Party freshman members of Congress hobnobbing with high-rolling donors at a Key Largo yacht club, downing cocktails at a $10,000-a-head happy hour and venturing to sea on a chartered fishing boat named the “Good Life.”
Colorado Congressman Cory Gardner, like many Republicans this week, took aim at President Obama over gas prices. He dismissed the president’s proposal to tap national oil and gas reserves as an election-year political fix and called instead for more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But Gardner’s proposal drew a swift fact-check rebuttal from his Fourth District Democratic opponent, Senate President Brandon Shaffer, who said it was Gardner who was playing politics.
Democratic state Senate President Brandon Shaffer, who is running fpr Congress against freshman Republican Rep. Cory Gardner in Colorado’s Fourth District, reported today that he pulled down $112,000 from more than 600 donors in the final quarter of 2011. The report comes as news circulates that Shaffer is testing the waters in the state’s Sixth Congressional District.
If Gov. John Hickenlooper has anything to say about it–and he will–most of a potential increase in state tax collections this year and in 2012 will go to restore some of the money cut from K-12 budgets in the past few years.
Colorado Fourth-District Republican US Rep Cory Gardner is filling his campaign coffers for 2012 as he did in 2010 by leaning heavily on oil-and-gas industry donors. He raked in $370,000 in the quarter that just ended. That’s the most of any candidate for federal office from Colorado and topped his take in previous quarters by roughly $100,000. One of every ten dollars Gardner brought in last quarter came from oil and gas, and this quarter the percentage is higher, coming in at roughly 12 percent. That notable campaign finance record paired with the high-profile pro-drilling and environmental-regulation-rollback positions he has taken mark out the freshman congressman as an aspiring top-level advocate for oil and gas on the Hill.
Still more than a year from Election Day, Colorado Fourth District Republican Congressman Cory Gardner today reported to the Federal Election Commission that he hauled down a whopping $371,312 over the last three months. That tops his second-quarter take by more than $70,000 to bring his total this year to $896,176. Roughly 12 percent of Gardner’s donations this quarter came from oil and gas companies or individuals and organizations tied to the oil and gas industry.
Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall at a gay-rights event this weekend in Denver said he supports marriage equality for all Americans. Udall joins a growing list of lawmakers who have gone on record in support of ending the era where the federal Defense of Marriage Act and where constitutional bans like Colorado’s Amendment 43 blocked LGBT couples from the legal protections and advantages provided by the state through marriage. Udall is the 18th sitting U.S. Senator to state publicly that he supports efforts to make gay marriage legal.
It would be premature to label Colorado’s Fourth District one of the nation’s swing districts, but that could change as a result of the 2012 election season. A court will decide the new outline of the district next month, but the district is undergoing a more profound transition. It is becoming the thing Iowa is supposed to be.
Freshman Republican Congressman Cory Gardner weathered a drawn out if ultimately not-close Tea Party caucus battle last year and rode the Republican wave to victory over Democrat Betsy Markey.* Less than a year later, he’s again navigating the increasingly rocky electoral waters of Colorado’s sprawling Fourth District.
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